Jim Cramer, former hedge fund manager and now television personality giving investment advice to millions said, “What’s important when you are in that hedge-fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view, that it’s important to create a new truth to develop a fiction.”
Harvard Business School students are told, “Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only 55 percent, say it as if you believe it 100 percent.”
A survey of 500 top executives found 1 in 4 agreed success in the financial sector may actually require conduct that is unethical and illegal.
We have seen this lack of values, morals, and care for the truth from Rodeo Drive to Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. People are systematically taught anti-social, money-obsessed ways of living every day. Selfish-materialism, celebrity worship, and a never-ending quest for more by those at the very top is in direct opposition with the advance of citizenship, public interest, community building and the common good.
If a poor person were to describe the importance of lying to procure SNAP benefits or disability payments to survive, there would be a call for an end to the benefits. If one lies to make billions he/she is a financial genius, if one lies to keep food on his/her family table they are thieves.
I’m Dan Kenney and this is my perspective.
